Archive for January, 2007

During the first media demonstration of the weapon Wednesday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios U.S. troops might encounter.

The crew fired beams from more than 500 yards (455 meters) away, nearly 17 times the range of existing non-lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets.

While the sudden, 130-degree Fahrenheit (54.44 Celsius) heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make participants think their clothes were about to ignite.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/01/24/ray.gun.ap/index.html

When you sell, how do you set your prospects on fire?

Buyers are heavily persuaded by language that gets them excited about your problem solving skills.

Reveal evidence that you help others and you’ll warm ’em up.

Cast a vision for the future, with your product or service in place, and that’ll heat ’em up further.

Help them realize that NOW IS THE TIME to address this concern and you fire ’em up to rid their company of the trouble you address.

These non-lethal selling weapons are critical to turning cold prospects into hot clients.

Jan. 23, 2007 — Daredevil Slovenian swimmer Martin Strel, who has swum the Yangtze, the Danube and the Mississippi rivers, plans to embark on a 70-day swim down the Amazon, from Peru to Brazil, local media reported.

The never-before-attempted 3,370-mile feat will be filmed and broadcast in real time starting Feb. 1 over the Internet on www.amazonswim.com, Andre Souza, a member of Strel’s team, told the daily Folha de Sao Paulo on Wednesday.

The intrepid Slovene, who has become a national hero in his home country, has already earned three mentions in the Guinness World Records book.

I’m going to swim in the middle of the river, where there is less of a chance of encountering dangerous fish and venomous snakes. My team is prepared, and we also have weapons on board to protect me if I am attacked,” Strel told Folha.

He was also the first to swim the United States’ 2,373-mile Mississippi River, in 2002.

Wow! Three great things about Martin Strel that sales pros can take to heart;

1) He has the guts to do something nobody else does. So how do you distinguish (REALLY, TRULY DISTINGUISH) yourself from the competition?

2) Failure can have dramatic consequences. Maybe if losing were more costly, we’d take more seriously the time we invest in our selling career. That includes skill improvement, ignoring (quickly) bad prospects and getting great training.

3) It’s a long journey mixed with great drama and long bouts of boredom. True sales pros realize that much of our work is plodding; just making the volume of calls to get to the best buyers. Then suddenly our lives are interrupted by success. We celebrate, then go back to stroking the phones.

Fame, true success and money can be yours, if you’ll commit to swimming the Amazon in your territory.

I have a good friend who recently got divorced. Two kids, husband was an athletic, engaging, professional guy.

She is now completely mortified about what she’s done. Her comment “who was that when I thought those things and ended my marriage? It wasn’t me!”

A good psychologist might have counseled her during her dark period to go into 2nd position when analyzing her trouble and frustration with her marriage.

2nd position is where a person mentally steps back from their dialogue with a spouse and “watches” herself interact with the other person. In essence, she is observing, fromafar, how she is acting and thinking.

2nd position is the ultimate coaching strategy. Because most solutions can be found inside the person whose behavior needs to change. They just have to get out of the moment of conflict and watch who they are.

This might sound confusing, but it isn’t that hard to do. And to simplify it further, you can also do this immediately after something happens, analyzing a situation by reviewing tape in your mind.

Salespeople can gain great value from getting into 2nd position when they sell to see what really is happening with a prospect. Am I starting to get anxious on this call? Is the prospect appearing to disengage? Is my body language poor?

Think about doing this the next time you converse with anyone. It’ll be good practice for you professional life.

Sales Autopsy (Kaplan Publishing) by Dan Seidman hit the #1 spot on Barnes & Noble’s business best-seller list in October. Rights have now been sold to publish to book in seven languages.

Sales pros around the world will now be able to learn some great selling strategies in their native tongues. Translations are planned for Spanish, Korean, Indonesian, two dialects of Portuguese and two Chinese dialects.

I was shocked to receive this news and it made me happy that my reach has just been extended to larger audiences of entrepreneurs, sales execs and sales reps.

Think about how you can touch more people.

Do you need to begin a publicity campaign, volunteer for a cause you believe in or even write a book?

REACH – lengthen and strenghthen your reach and the money will soon follow.

When I was managing a team of 15 reps I had a rule which they were allowed to break:

DON’T LISTEN TO THE RADIO ON THE WAY INTO WORK.

Eventually, everyone began to abide by my encouragement to leave it off. They turned off the music about lost loves and the news about lost lives.

Here are three GREAT REASONS you want to let silence rule your ride to work.

1) News is by nature negative

2) Radio hosts’ opinions can become your own

3) You don’t listen to your own voice often enough

Start your day, not by ingesting the dark part of our world, but by just thinking. You will find your creative juices begin to flow and will come to work calmed and ready for all the wild things that occur as part of a sales pro’s day.

And you might find it hard to believe but our goldfish haven’t fared well either.

How many lives do you have left in your sales career?

Many reps bounce from job to job because good, even mediocre salespeople can always find work. Plus, they can certainly persuade a manager to hire them.

Longevity in a company, and an industry, and a territory will give you regular increases in income as your reputation, knowledge and experience pay off.

Don’t be so quick to jump ship when things get tough. Stay the course and your performance will improve as prospects and clients in your marketplace begin to feel comfortable with you and can count on you to be there for them.

If you’ve been somewhere more than 15 years, I congratulate you and invite you to come have dinner with us sometime.

Worst, ABSOLUTELY the worst ad on television today is the Volkswagen commercial.

Two people are driving, chatting away, life is good.

BAM! A CAR SLAMS INTO THEM, VIOLENTLY SNAPPING HEADS AND BODIES, THEN SILENCE.

Next scene is the two people standing outside a crushed car with caved in side.

They’re okay, but I (like every viewer I’ve questioned about this ad) am sick in the pit of my stomach at the collision.

First, why would you want prospects to physically feel ill when looking at your product?

Second, Volvo OWNS the safety brand in automobiles, not VW.

Somehow, Volkswagen executives have managed to create a disgusting experience in a commercial while competing with competitor’s creative moments like Chevys flying through the air and other enjoyable 30 or 60 second eye-bytes.

Your job is to make prospects feel good. You can do that by finding a way to get them to laugh as early in the conversation as possible (my #1 strategy, by the way). You can offer them something to eat, drink, a gift. Do anything to create an environment where people want to hang out with you, rather than wince and wonder how quickly this will be over.

Volkswagen, you blew it, badly. Some decision-maker somewhere had his or her creative brain collide with common sense. Welcome to the world of free exposure through your expensively manufactured sales horror story.

Hey Dan,
Hope you are doing great, thanks alot for the surport you have been giving me through your emails.This has made me improve alot in my sales and as I write this mail am now the asst. sales manager in an advertising company based in Nairobi-Kenya with offices in Uganda & Tanzania. All this credit goes to you and may God bless you.

Wishing you a very good Xmas and happy 2007 looking forwad to great thing next year.
Dishon Emali

It was a nice surprise to receive an email from so far away. And I can’t really take credit for Dishon’s success.

His success is simply because he applied the learning he acquired from my teaching. And he was taught by reading coaching tips, not by attending a class.

What will you apply that you learned recently?

Are there sales strategies you can put into play to bump your performance?

Pick one or two or three new things you’ll do differently and do them for the next two months. They’ll then become a permanent part of your toolbox.

And, thank you my friend from far away for thanking me. You’re better today because you had the wisdom to change in the first place.